EMERGING TECHNOLOGY

The future of enterprise productivity is spatial, auditory, and digitally assisted. We bring the human element to app design and development.

Spatial is at the forefront of developing new approaches and techniques for assessing the human impact of emerging technology experiences.

While it’s early days in terms of widespread adoption of emerging technologies, such as virtual/augmented/mixed reality (VR/AR/MR) and voice interaction, we believe that focusing on how people engage with these new technologies is the key to success.

We work with enterprise clients and developers to evaluate the dynamics of emerging technology experiences – how people react, connect, learn, communicate and interact.

Human Impact Research and Extended Reality

VR/AR/MR are often referred to collectively as extended reality or XR. This is a rapidly growing space, with significant investment driving technology and application development.

A key focus for Spatial over the past year, has been to better understand the unique challenges of researching and testing immersive experiences. We’ve done this in partnership with UBC’s Behaviour Attention Reality Lab (BAR Lab), led by Professor Alan Kingstone of the Psychology Department.

The partnership brings post doctorates and undergraduate interns together with Spatial’s team of researchers to solve problems, build knowledge and develop ethical research capabilities.

By combining existing usability testing techniques with new measurement frameworks and test protocols our aim is to help developers and clients produce better immersive experiences and understand how people perceive, respond to and work with new devices and input methods (voice, gestures, gaze).

Technoethics

Another human-centric area of research that our lab is focused on is ethics in technology.

As technology has become intrinsic to our lives, part of our beings and embedded in our homes (smart phones, wearables, internet of things, voice activated assistants), it’s increasingly important for designers and developers to consider and minimize harmful impacts.

One of the goals of our lab is to bring behavioural sciences research from the academic realm and into the design and development of digital products in a more deliberate and accountable way.

We deliver research with impact, bringing our clients closer to customers and delivering data driven insights. Our researchers continually evolve their approach and methods to keep pace with the rapid shifts in mediums and technology.